Facebook Fighting Fake News with Links to Other Angles

The site faced criticism for allegedly aiding Donald Trump's victory in the USA presidential election, due to untrue stories about Trump and rival Hillary Clinton spreading across the site.

After U.S. President Donald Trump's election, Facebook was criticized for allowing false information to go viral, potentially resulting in misinformed voters.

The company is also working with certain third-party fact checkers in order to carefully examine popular news items on the social media platform.

Facebook says its objective with Related Articles and updated machine learning tech is to offer users more context on the validity of a story they see in their feed.

Facebook has also rolled out a new feature in four countries (initially the United States, the Netherlands, Germany and France) that will publish alternative news links beneath questionable articles.

Facebook on Thursday began offering additional links to news stories as another method to help users discern false news and misinformation.

The world's largest online social network giant will send more potential hoax articles to third-party fact checkers and show their findings below the original post as it tries to fight so-called fake news.

"We don't want to be and are not the arbiters of the truth", FacebookNews Feed integrity product manager Tessa Lyons told TechCrunch. "That should provide people easier access to additional perspectives and information, including articles by third-party fact checkers", Facebook had stated at the time of the initial release. So we're rolling this out more broadly.